multifandom potluck

Mostly Tolkien, Zelda, Welcome Home, Yugioh, Fullmetal Alchemist and Moomins, but anything goes

[the-sweaty-toothed-mad-woman]

today’s the only day you can reblog this

“There Will Come Soft Rains”, Ray Bradbury

[glitter-stained]

Jason Todd Meta: My opinion on the csa headcanon

Does Jason's behaviour suggest he was a victim of csa?

There is very little, in terms of clinical signs, that’s going to point to csa specifically, because most symptoms, for psychiatric disorders, aren’t specific to one disorder or cause. One thing that’s usually a good hint would be children making very sexual statements/references/jokes/behaviours that are very inappropriate in context (a good example of this would be Roman Roy from Succession); night terrors are bed wettings amongst children/teenagers over a certain age. But that is absolutely not necessary: many, if not most victims of csa don’t display these specific signs, and a twelve years old that suffers from night terrors is not necessarily a victim of csa. The one thing that tells you for sure, in a person with trauma, that they have been a victim of csa, is that they’re telling you they have been a victim of csa. I’m insisting on that part because there’s a whole bunch of therapists (cough cough psychanalysts) that will tell you confidently that your psychiatric symptoms stem from a childhood sexual trauma (cherry on top of the shit cake if it’s incestuous) that you didn’t know about because you’ve repressed it. I repeat, that’s bullshit. If you meet a clinician who tells you that, RUN. So, a warning: this is probably the least “psychological analysis” of my “Jason psychological analysis posts”, because Jason’s symptoms do not allow us to conclude formally for or against a history of sexual abuse. But that doesn’t mean we can’t do some meta, make sure we're on the same page with what's analyzed here, some textual analysis, discuss what the csa headcanon does and does not imply in terms of his behaviour. I think it’s a good idea to start with it so we know where we’re standing with our analysis, regardless of the fact it’s maybe not the most interesting in terms of psychopathology and neuropsychology.

A couple of disclaimers:

I only talk about the comics I want to talk about. This is for two reasons, which are that 1) I do what I want and if I don’t like/don’t find something interesting, I’m not gonna waste time on it; and 2) I’ve been reading comics for a couple of months only, and there are, like, a lot of them. If there are comics you wanna see analysed under that lense, feel free to suggest them! I might not want to, but it also could be that I haven’t read them yet. Additionally, I'm not interested in questioning the morality of Jason's actions here. Ethics are fun, and I like talking about them sometimes, and morality sometimes has a place in talks about demonization but largely speaking this isn't the space for that. I separate talk about morality and psychology stuff as much as I can for a reason, so if you are looking here for excuses for his behaviour or arguments as to why he is a bad person, you're in the wrong place. Moral judgement is irrelevant here for the most part.

On the events of Red Hood: Lost Days:

Jason has, at some point in the comics, been a victim of csa. When Talia kisses Jason before pushing him off a cliff right after he got out of the Lazarus Pit, and when she initiates sex with him in Lost Days, that’s not consent!! That’s a grown woman taking advantage of a traumatized teenager who is, on top of that, deeply indebted to her. That’s a predatory act, with a steep power imbalance, it’s sexual assault, and on top of that there’s an element of suggested pseudo-incest. That decision was retconned, and thank god, because it was a brutal assassination of Talia’s character based on a good bit of racism, and also because the way it was portrayed doesn’t make it clear that Jason is a victim in a situation rather than that super annoying trope of “teenage guy gets to bang a hot MILF and hahaha lucky him”, writing a male character in a situation of SA without acknowledging it as SA or taking it seriously is one of the tropes I hate most, it reinforces stigmatisation and isolates victims. For all of these reasons, I’m not gonna include that element in my analysis, but it’s important to note that if you do include those scenes in your conception of it, then Jason is undeniably a victim of csa and everything discussed about it applies to him.

What if it were a lie?

I’ve said it before (and I’ll say it again), I deeply, violently hate headcanons/tropes where a character lies about being a victim of csa (whether it’s for manipulation, personal gain, any reason really I don’t care). It’s rare as fuck in real life, however it’s a common trope that feeds into fear of being wrongfully accused that causes push-back and increases social stigmatization. CSA is a painful thing associated with intense feelings of shame and already a deep fear of not being believed. Imagine making a considerable effort to seek help after something terrible happened/is happening to you, and you have to brave your fear of not being believed on top of that, and once you’ve made all that effort you get rejected and villainized because it’s just easier for the person you’re reaching out to not to believe it. So I’m awfully weary of this type of headcanon, and I think a general rule of thumb is “if your interpretation of what the character is saying is that he’s talking about how he was abused, especially if he’s talking about sexual assault, then it happened.” If you don’t like that, if you don’t feel like that’s good representation, then you can question the story, think it should be retconned, or rethink your interpretation of what the character says if it’s ambiguous, but hcing that the character lied about his assault is not a hypothesis we’re going to accept here no matter what. So we can start by scratching that one out: Jason never lies about being a victim of csa, or wilfully hints at it even though that’s untrue, at any point.

Two other ideas I’ve seen floating around that I think are worth mentioning:

No, just because Jason lived in the streets as a kid doesn’t mean the only way he survived was through underage prostitution. I genuinely don’t understand that idea, yes being a street kid makes you extremely vulnerable, yes it makes the risk of resolving to underage prostitution to survive higher but it’s absolutely not a fatality. That idea is, quite frankly, weird. Do you automatically assume if a real life person tells you they were in the streets for some time at a kid that they are a victim of csa? Also, I've seen the idea go around that because some people have a strong reading/hc of Jason as bi (which I have no problem with I love bi Jason), that would be an argument in favour of the csa hc. Please don’t do that. There’s no link between queer sexual orientations and childhood sexual abuse, that’s a harmful myth that we should work to deconstruct or, at the very least, not continue to vehiculate.

Another important thing to keep in mind: childhood sexual abuse =/= childhood sexual trauma.

Now, a traumagenic situation is a situation that might induce trauma (so development of, acute stress disorder, ptsd, cptsd, derealization, any traumatic pathology really). These situations exist on a continuum of probability to be traumatized by this situation. For example, a flood, a car accident, witnessing a murder and being sexually assaulted are all traumagenic situations, but the probability of developing trauma from them are very different. It hinges on personal, situational, social, and environmental risk factors (that have nothing to do with being weak, anybody can develop trauma). A definition for traumagenic situations can be found in the diagnostic criteria for ptsd in the dsm-5:

A. “Exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence in one (or more) of the following ways:

1. Directly experiencing the traumatic event(s).

2. Witnessing, in person, the event(s) as it occurred to others.

3. Learning that the traumatic event(s) occurred to a close family member or close friend. In cases of actual or threatened death of a family member or friend, the event(s) must have been violent or accidental.

4. Experiencing repeated or extreme exposure to aversive details of the traumatic event(s) (e.g., first responders collecting human remains; police officers repeatedly exposed to details of child abuse). Note: Criterion A4 does not apply to exposure through electronic media, television, movies, or pictures, unless this exposure is work related.”

Note that the this last criteria has been added from the DSM-5 in order to explain cases of PTSD observed in at-risk jobs like cops exposed to repeated detailed child abuse, first responders collecting human remains, or, crucially, vigilantes repeatedly exposed to brutal crimes. This means that Jason, when he works on the Dumpster Slasher case, when he is horrified to find Gloria in the immediate aftermath of her rape (and later finds her dead body, because witnessing the consequences of these traumatic events is also an important component of that second-hand trauma), is being exposed to a very traumagenic situation. As I said before, that doesn’t necessarily mean you will experience trauma (thank fuck for that), but there are factors that influence that. SA related situations has an already pretty high probability of inducing trauma. On top of that, age is a big factor in that: the younger you are, the less resources, emotional regulation, development and coping mechanisms to face the traumagenic event you have (though there is such a thing as “too young to have PTSD" -when your memory is simply not developed enough for the memory to traumatize you because you will not remember the event.) At fifteen, with his memory fully developed but his brain going through so much changes because of teenagehood and his past history, Jason would be at risk. On top of that, you’re more at risk to get traumatized if you’re already stressed out when the event happens, so Jason’s mental state at this point in his robin run is also a risk factor. All to say, it’s very plausible for Jason to have sexual trauma without being a victim of sexual abuse in relation to canon events. Besides, in headcanon territory when it comes to Jason’s childhood before Robin, there are so many ways to be exposed to sexual violence : witnessing/finding his mother being a victim (considering the position of extreme vulnerability Catherine was in), witnessing assault in the streets, being the victim of attempted SA and escaping, watching street kids get picked up and later find their bodies/being told by other kids, as a cautionary tale, in excruciating detail, testimonies of their own assault… Or for example, if we’re thinking about Arkham Knight, being constantly threatened with SA, it being hinted and joked about and hanging over him like a sword of Damocles is something I could see Joker and other inmates do that could definitely induce sexual trauma even if it doesn’t happen ; what matters most, in trauma, is that the fear is real. Mechanically, when we’re looking at the way trauma works even on a biological level, the overwhelming fear is at the core of the pathology. (This is also why you can develop PTSD after a psychotic episode.) Like, my point isn’t that one of these things happened to Jason, or that he has to have sexual trauma from the events of the Diplomat’s Son or anything -mostly just that this is a possibility, something very serious that happens and an important nuance that I never see in discussions on the csa headcanon, and while it’s not exactly what the debate is about, I think it’s something important to ponder.

Do you consider the csa hc to be canon?

So, there are a lot of Jason stories, and I’m very pro “not take in account what is said in comics you dislike in your conception of canon” because if I did that absolutely no bat character would be readable, I have to believe that no character is defined by their worst writers. And boy, does Jason have a lot of bad writing… On top of the personal retcons, there are also the canon retcons: like Battle for The Cowl is retconned… Unless someone decides to reinject/revamp it into the narrative (please don’t please don’t it’s irrecuperable let it lay with the Flying Todds where it belongs). So, let’s see. There are three writers/arcs that imply/mention the csa hc: Starlin’s writing of Jason’s post-crisis Robin Run (canon though some stuff in it seems to have been retconned), Winick’s writing in Green Arrow: Seeing Red (canon as far as I know), and Battle for the Cowl (retconned). It’s worth noting that one of those are considered to be foundational works for Jason’s character (Jason’s post crisis Robin Run and Starlin’s part in it), and another was written by Winick, who wrote the other two foundational Jason stories: Under The Red Hood and Red Hood: Lost Days. On a personal level, I’m very mitigated about what I like and accept about it. I base my whole love and characterization of Jason about his post-crisis Robin Run, I love that little guy so much, Starlin’s take on Jason’s Robin Run is absolutely canon to me (which does not mean I like Starlin as a writer, thank you very much). On the other hand of the spectrum, the only reason Battle for the Cowl isn’t my least favourite comic ever is because The Killing Joke exists, absolutely not canon, get this thing away from me. And then in the middle, my feelings on Seeing Red (on the entirety of Winick’s Jason really) vary depending on the day, because I do like a revenge story that challenges the status quo with tropes of “bad victim” and it sets up Jason as a character based on love rather than morals which I adore, but there are also some elements of psychophobia in the writing that I (who approach stories through the filter of psychopathology first and foremost) can’t just look past, and also the way it intertwines with classist stereotypes. So do I consider Seeing Red to be canon? In good faith, yes, but whether I’ll accept it as such really depends on the day. In terms of the csa headcanon: it’s heavily hinted in BTFC but not outright said, it’s there as a undercurrent in Starlin’s run because of his intention (to make Jason die of AIDS). And then we have Seeing Red. Basically Jason lists elements about Mia’s life, including her past with underage prostitution (so, just to be very clear, csa), and says they’re very similar, having both lived on the streets, and understand having to do bad things when it’s necessary. This is not the same as saying “I was a victim of csa”, and what he’s saying could be interpreted differently (we know that he was stealing tires, and “only what he needs to survive”, so he could have been referencing small-time theft.) So, it could be a reference to something else, I totally understand why some people want to interpret differently. It just… Feels like such a weird and weak argument to be equating boosting tires to underage prostitution, to me it’s very ooc (in comparison to UTH Jason), and it would feel like weak writing from someone like Winick. Aka it’s not technically canon, and you don’t have to accept it as such(I understand the mentality of "I'm rejecting this interpretation because it feels like demonization of csa victims" perfectly), but personally I think it takes a lot from Jason’s character in Seeing Red and from this story in general.

[glitter-stained]

But do you like/integrate it in your conception of Jason’s character?

Yes. One thing about my conception of art and headcanons is, I think a work of art is born from the encounter between a creator and a spectator through the intermediary of the work of art. A book is just a book until you pick up the story, it’s the collision of the two worldviews that create the story, including what you think the author is saying, what the author thinks you’ll understand from what they’re saying, your prior knowledge of the writer and his world but also your knowledge and conception of the world (like if you’re reading hamlet and also know the criteria for depression), etc. So it’s not that the curtains are just blue, or that the only thing that matters is whether or not the curtains were blue. The curtains being blue means the character is sad if 1) you associate blue with sadness and/or 2) you think the author associates blue with sadness, and it matters to you what the author says. Art, and any story, is fundamentally interactive. Sometimes, that meeting is love at first sight; and sometimes, it’s a fistfight. My relationship with Jason’s character in comics is very much a fistfight, so let’s talk about writer intent and reader context for the csa headcanon.

1. Writer's intent:

I love Jason so much in an “enemy of my enemy” kind of way, I think a big part of why he’s my fav is just genuine spite. I can’t unknow the fact that Sterlin wanted him to be a victim of csa when looking at this scene (which had no reason to be included in the dumpster slasher story but to set the “mystery” of Jason being a csa victim and create a lovely parallel between Judy and Jason.)

With that said, because Starlin’s idea and his treatment of AIDS sucks so bad, I might have thrown the baby away with the bathwater if it were just him. But with the fact that it was followed up by two arcs, by two different writers at different times in his story where Jason plays an antagonist in a way that’s verbally hinted pisses me off so bad. I call it the “Sheldon Cooper” effect (it probably has another name that idk though). In Big Bang Theory, Sheldon Cooper is evidently autistic-coded, and not in a “oh he’s so me he’s definitely autistic” kinda way, but in a “these are all the most famous autism stereotypes concentrated in one character and dialled up to eleven”. But because in the show they tell you “oh he’s not autistic dw we had him tested”, they’re able to get away with saying “what are you talking about? It’s not that deep, you’re projecting your headcanon, stop being so offended by everything smh…” He’s a virulent caricature of autism that’s only “funny” in that it allows the viewer to make fun of and punch down on autistic people in total impunity. (this also happens with queer-coded characters, mental illness, etc. just bad faith). In Battle For the Cowl it’s especially clear that implying it without saying it allows to get away with using csa as a reason to trigger Jason into randomly going “crazy evil” without having to acknowledge they’re saying “being a victim of csa makes you go crazy evil when you’re triggered”. My opinion would probably be more nuanced if it were just Winick, especially given that Jason’s more of a sympathetic villain in it, that Winick has given us Mia, his background when it comes to talking about AIDS, and the fact that Seeing Red was about Mia means I could be more charitable about not taking up that space for that at that time in the story (though I’m still pissed about the unacknowledged SA in Lost Days). But Battle for the Cowl makes it very clear that Jason’s “mysterious traumatic past from his childhood before Bruce took him in”, to dc writers, is a “mystery to be solved later”, a little plot-hook that they can put in their bag and play with later when they need it.

I’m pissed at this. I want them to take it seriously. As far as I’m concerned, Jason’s status as a csa victim exists as a semi-official ghost hanging over his storyline, and I’m like no, you don’t get to do that. You want to talk about themes this heavy, that have such an impact on people’s life, that has such a stigma and taboo to it, you better engage with it. You don’t get to shy away from what you are talking about. You don’t get to write horror without looking the horror in its eyes, you don’t get to further the culture of taboo and shame around childhood sexual abuse by shying away from even naming it like a coward. You want to talk about csa? You better sit at the table and talk about csa, and fucking do it well. So yes, to me the csa hc is an unavoidable part of Jason’s character and if I were a dc writer I would do my best to write it into a story where it establishes clearly and openly as something that happened, I would talk about the shame, taboo, stigma of it in a way that makes it clear both the impact it has on his mental health and that the narrative directly contradicts these ideas, I would talk about the parts of his mental health and development it impacted, his disillusions and worldview, I would make it crystal fucking clear that this is not what turned Jason into a killer, I would bury Battle for the Cowl into the ground and I would make it as hard as possible for any writer that comes after me to use Jason and his pats with csa as a tool to shame and demonize victims any further. That’s the dream.

2. Reader Context

The second part of the fistfight, the context and worldview of the reader, also matters a lot. While Jason’s death and rebirth probably wasn’t meant as a metaphor for sa survivors (if i’m wrong and winick did intend it that way please correct me because that would be very cool), it reads like it to a lot of readers, including me, who find in it a very relatable echo of their experiences/of the cautionary tales they have born witness to. This experience and outlook is valid and interesting and enriches the experience. You don’t have to share it, you can dislike it (I totally understand the sentiment of how the hc and similar readings feel like demonizing victims since UTH! Jason is a villain who chops off heads), but you absolutely must respect it. There’s another post that explains why it reads like this to many people very well, and I’ll add to it that there’s a parallel between death and rape/sexual assault that is all about dehumanization. There’s a reason with traumagenic situations are defined as “exposure or threat of death, bodily harm or sexual assault”; that’s something that’s often mentioned in testimonies, the comparison between SA and the idea of death, the sentiment of being objectified and dispossessed of your body. This reading is also very present in my conception of Jason and another reason why I “like” and believe the csa headcanon. I’m also a sucker for stories where the characters endure things/face trauma in a very real way that is also mirrored in themes by metaphors in their story.

[glitter-stained]

For a psychology meta, this talks a lot about your philosophy of comics and very little about psychology. What would be the consequences of csa on an analysis of Jason’s mental health?

Yeah, sorry. I’m gonna include the csa hc in a lot of the metas going forward, so I felt I had to talk about why, its status in canon and my analysis, even though it might take us a little off-topic. So, you’ll see me talk about it later in other more pointed analysis. The thing you have to understand here is, nobody is the same in the way they’re going to process their trauma, their resources etc. Trauma, sexual or otherwise, does not “make you” into one thing (which is why someone with sexual trauma might develop touch-aversion while another might be super sexually promiscuous). I can’t tell you “well if this happened to Jason here’s what we can expect”. Well, we can expect CPTSD (again, csa is extremely traumagenic, and most people who were victims of csa will develop a form of trauma (as in “a trauma disorder.” We’ll talk about cptsd/bpd later on, just know when I say trauma I can mean ptsd, cptsd, bpd, did, derealization/depersonalization disorder, etc.) And hey, Jason does have CPTSD! The issue is, he also has a dozen other traumatic events going into the CPTSD, so it’s not that simple a ball of yarn to unravel. What we can do is form hypothesis as to what the manifestations of the trauma from csa look like, what beliefs were engrained, what patterns are taught. In this picture, for example, my understanding of it is an attempt to regain agency by reversing the power with an aggressor: Jason is asking “how does it feel to be the victim for once?” as he regains control over his narrative, agentivity in a situation where he was objectified, and closure as he gets to the “good ending”, the conclusion of his story that never occurred in his past and every time he’s dissociating/having a flashback.

[glitter-stained]

That’s the angle I like best for considering the role Robin plays for Jason while taking in account the csa headcanon: Robin gives Jason agency, and more than that, power. It allows him to change his place in the narrative, from helpless victim to the one in control, the one who can defeat any villain, the one with the bright cape and confident smile, and Batman has his back. Can you imagine? One moment, you’re a child wishing a superhero would come beat up your abuser and rescue you, and the next you’re the superhero? (Mia certainly can). That’s the way I love to interpret it, that to Jason, Robin gave him the magic to be able to change the ending of his own story*.

* i'm aware that the "robin gives me magic" is a pre-crisis quote, it just felt like an adequate way to word it.

[glitter-stained]

But of course, the story does not have a happy ending. And The Dumpster Slasher, the Diplomat’s Son and A Death in the Family actually make a lot of sense for that theme when considered under that angle. Consider : in The Dumpster Slasher, Batman and Robin are powerless to stop the villain; Judy, however, is the one in control of the story, and when Jason praises her at the end, Batman condemns her and makes it clear this isn’t an option for Robin to take this course of action. The storyline is dumb in many ways but it really comes in as a first confrontation to Jason of the limits of what Robin can do. Then, of course, there’s the Diplomat Son, another Batman and GCPD epic fail where they are, this time, completely unable to get to the “happy ending”. The abuser isn’t gonna face justice. He is going to go right back to his country where nothing will protect the women there from his violence, and on top of that not only couldn’t they save Gloria from getting assaulted, but they couldn’t stop him from pushing Gloria to suicide right in front of them. And all of this is thrown directly in Jason’s face, first when he is the one to find Gloria in the immediate aftermath of her rape, and second when he finds her dead body. Jason’s reaction to refuse Felipe impunity and immediately rushing after him makes a lot of sense. And then? Well, either he kills him or he doesn’t, but what matters most is that Batman believes he did it – a direct mirror to Judy’s actions- and condemns it. And though he does not bench him for it then, it’s clear that this is a turning point in Batman’s trust in Jason as Robin, that not only does Bruce condemn it but it makes him question Jason’s place as Robin, the imprinted idea that Robin, which used to give you the magic to fix the bad things that happened in the past, is incompatible with the possibility of fixing the bad things that are happening now.

[glitter-stained]

So that’s that! I’m sorry if that wasn’t as like, psychopathology-dense and informative as you had hoped, hopefully you liked it and it was clear on my position on the topic. Now here’s to hoping someone at dc will have the clarity of mind and empathy skill to address the topic respectfully for once -or at the very least, that they never drop another Battle for the Cowl storyline on us again.  

Masterpost

[aalghul]

Why Do People Think Jason Todd is the "Dumb" Robin?

I just saw your post defending Jason's intelligence. THANK YOU for that! But I wanted to know why people think of him as the dumb Robin?

In the comics, has anyone OBJECTIVELY described Jason Todd as a moron? Was low intelligence ever listed as one of his weaknesses? Was he ever portrayed as a class clown or something?

Maybe it's because fans wanted to typecast someone as the "dumb jock" and Jason's physique fit the stereotype?

I'm just trying to understand how this belief started out. Is there any basis for it? Even in his more controversial portrayals?

Jason was never described as anything below extremely intelligent when he was Robin. This applies to both pre and post-crisis, but I know people like to whine about how Jason stans confuse pre-crisis Jason’s personality with post-crisis. (Generally people who don’t read comics or don’t understand how crisis worked. Jason’s core character traits stayed largely the same. Even if that was not true, crisis did not erase all of Jason’s time as Robin from prior; it was gently added to his post-crisis run as Robin.)

Jason was described as brash and reckless and angry only after Tim became Robin, so that Bruce (& DC) could be absolved of blame over his death + to make Tim seem like a better Robin in comparison. They were probably worried people weren’t actually willing to just accept a new Robin like Tim, mainly because he wasn’t as skilled as Dick or Jason, so DC overcompensated. Two birds with one stone, I guess. So, not very objective at all, considering it was all done to paint a picture of Jason that very blatantly opposed what was actually true.

UTRH, the defining story for who Jason is post resurrection, very clearly made Jason outsmart Bruce on every level. Bruce never ‘caught’ Jason, it was a planned reveal and confrontation and everything. Following UTRH, Jason was viewed as a dangerous threat in every appearance. N52 Outlaws sucked, but even that didn’t generally ignore Jason’s intelligence. I think it’s generally agreed upon that Battle for the Cowl is the worst portrayal of Jason…ever. But even then, it doesn’t treat Jason like some second rate villain. If Morrison was going to make him a villain, he should’ve showed off his skills a little more, but that isn’t to say that Jason wasn’t a major threat. Basically the only person in BftC that was on Jason’s level was Dick, and it wasn’t like Dick didn’t take him seriously. And that continued on after BftC, and right up until the reboot. What’s important to note is that Jason wasn’t even actually ‘caught’ as Dick’s villain either, he let himself be taken to Arkham. He lost because of his emotions, same as in UTRH, not because he couldn’t mentally keep up with Dick or Bruce (who are well established as some of the smartest people in the DC universe).

It is N52 & Rebirth that decided to cement the Red Hood as some trigger happy idiot instead of the highly trained threat ther came up with a plan to fuck with both Batman and the Green Arrow (and Speedy) in like an evening. And succeeded. Just because he felt like it. Coincidentally, Jason being dumbed down often went hand-in-hand with Jason & Tim suddenly being buddy-buddy. But it wasn’t just that. Most recently, we have Urban Legends’ Cheer story showing Jason being what fanon has wanted for years: an idiot that doesn’t know when not to think with his guns. But never has Jason been called an idiot without the intent to kick his actual intelligence under the table. It’s always characters with some sort of bias, in some way.

We have, however, had a monitor (different scale of ‘feelings’ than humans; literally was not possible for this mf to be biased) say this in response to Jason figuring out what was going on with Donna, Duela and himself (this was some messy universal error stuff, by the way. He went off of like a few words from one interaction and half a connection. And he was right):

Countdown to Final Crisis #46

As for why fans characterize Jason that way, it’s half just being lazy and assuming he must be an idiot cuz they think he looks the part of the “dumb jock”. People always reduce characters to stupid things (like Stephanie’s personality, according to fanon, is waffles & sass & also being an idiot). That’s not out of the ordinary, but the point about Steph also being labelled as an idiot in fanon brings me to the worst reason that Jason is mischaracterized on such a large level over something that should never have been contestable: classism. Plain and simple. Not to pick on Tim, but Tim was born a millionaire and has always been rich (yes, including when his dad lost his money. They were still living extremely comfortably, so it’s unfair to include him not being a millionaire anymore with Jason, Steph, Duke and Dick). It’s so easy for people to look at characters that are born into wealth and go to private schools, and just decide that they have to be the “smart one”. It doesn’t matter if that wasn’t even true originally. It doesn’t matter that the “idiot” Robins weren’t anything but geniuses until they had to be dumbed down for the benefit of an originally unrelated character, because they were from the streets. They have to be stupid, have poor vocabulary, never be able to keep up with other characters, etc. It’s really obvious when it’s Jason and Steph both receiving this treatment, especially considering that there’s more canon proof against these portrayals.

So, that’s that. There’s no real basis for it with either Jason or Steph. People are just stupid or stupid and classist.

[markholiclee-blog]

On the other hand it's incredibly funny that people are actually accepting that Bruce, of all people, would be outsmarted by the assigned 'dumbest' member of the bat cast. Or do they simply not draw the connection?

[jasontoddsno1simp]

They absolutely haven’t because most people cut out 90% of what Jason is doing in UtRH and just focus on the final confrontation. They literally go from 8 heads in the duffel bag to "I will be a better Batman than you" to "YOU WILL CHOOSE NOW"

[nijiryuu]

I think especially kids from the street have to be smart, because if they aren’t they’re not going to survive

[aropride]

please god let chatgpt die out like nfts did. With a fast and graceless fall into irrelevancy

[bladespark]

Like to charge, reblog to cast.

[atwotonedbird]

This spell has a very low hit ratio, so we need a lot of us to do it.

[batsandbirdsandothers]

i'm-decapitating-mob-bosses'-heads Jason and ghost!jason

[support me on kofi💓💓]

[sexhaver2]

we're like 5 years tops from this style of advertisement unironically being posted on twitter

[justalurkr]

Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.

But... Stochastic Parrots.

Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.

Her name is Timnit Gebru.

She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.

The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.

The paper had not even been published yet.

Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.

The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.

This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.

The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.

The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.

Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.

Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.

The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.

In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.

The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.

In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.

The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.

Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.

This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.

The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.

The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.

Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.

She was making that argument from inside Google.

Then Google proved her right by removing her.

The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.

Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.

Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.

The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.

Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.

The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.

The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.

And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so.

[irispurpurea]

This is the paper. It's excellent, highly recommend reading it.

I remember reading about Gebru's firing but I had no idea this was the paper she was fired over.

[achillesinhighheels]

untitled, ballerina at brooklyn music school, 1992.

📸 by: leroy w. henderson

[random-brushstrokes]

Warwick Reynolds (British, 1880-1926) - Prosperity

[clowncarpool]

gf got me new posca markers for christmas, so i drew her brother’s cat. her name’s engine bc they found her in a car engine.

[clowncarpool]

engine update:

[odyver]

alright I've got to do some quick math to explain attitudes towards AI to my boss.

we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)

please rb for larger sample size!

Question 1/3

What is your age, and do you feel AI is a net positive or net negative in our lives today?

under 18, AI is a net positive

under 18, AI is a net negative

18-29, AI is a net positive

18-29, AI is a net negative

30-45, AI is a net positive

30-45, AI is a net negative

46-60, AI is a net positive

46-60, AI is a net negative

over 60, AI is a net postive

over 60, AI is a net negative

Voting ended onJun 11

[odyver]

Question 2/3

How often do you visit or interact with museums/archives (whether in person or online)?

Frequently (multiple times per month)

Often (multiple times per year)

Occasionally (a couple times per year)

Rarely (once every couple of years)

Never :(

Voting ended onJun 11

[odyver]

Question 3/3

If you saw a museum was using AI in exhibits, marketing, research, etc., would you be more or less inclined to visit that museum?

under 18, more inclined

under 18, less inclined

18-29, more inclined

18-29, less inclined

30-45, more inclined

30-45, less inclined

46-60, more inclined

46-60, less inclined

over 60, more inclined

over 60, less inclined

Voting ended onJun 11

Thank you for helping with this data collection. Please rb for as big a sample as possible!

🫶

[odyver]

This got more traction than I imagined and has motivated me to make a more thorough survey where I can actually parse the data.

No email is necessary to input to complete the survey. Please also consider sharing this off tumblr with people in your life to get a broader sample, especially people who love history and love museums!

General Sentiment Surrounding AI Usage in Museums and Archives

Please give your thoughts on Generative AI (such as Sora, ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) usage in museums, archives, and other cultural heritage sit

[feanorian-songbird]

I wrote this in the 'additional thoughts' section of the survey, but I feel like it needed to be said so I thought I'd copy and paste it here for others consideration before I hit submit: - - -

Museums and archives have long been places that students, researchers, and more rely on for information which, to the best of their knowledge, has been thoroughly vetted by experts and had clear lines drawn between fact and speculation. Even ignoring the countless ethical concerns of GenAi for a moment, the truth remains that GenAi does not know the difference between fact and speculation, nor does it understand that frequency does not equal fact.

If a racial stereotype, for example, is repeated enough times in a set of historical documents and theories from, let's say, the era of eugenics, GenAi will not necessarily understand the context of those being often repeated stereotypes used to justify historical racism as opposed to truthful accounts and descriptions. This runs the risk of the Ai then accepting and repeating a racist narrative as fact due to word frequency prioritization. A real historian, with the context of the era in mind, would immeadiately notice the bias in writing and recognize the documents as the racially-charged speculation they were as opposed to factual evidence. This is but one of the countless possible scenarios in which Ai helps to perpetuate outdated stereotypes and misconceptions as facts due to an inability to understand personal bias and nuance.

Museums and archives were always meant to be publicly accessible stores of information, paired with the all-important ingredient of historical context supplied by experts; Generative Ai represents the antithesis of this. Yes, its datasets can rapidly scrape tens of thousands of documents in a very short amount of time, more than a human researcher could in a year or even a lifetime, but with no context, no cultural understanding, and no rhyme or reason beyond frequency and vague word association, this 'research' is little more than inaccurate, unreliable, historically-themed Lorem ipsum text at best, and harmful, deeply prejudiced word vomit at worst.

In my personal opinion, any museum attempting to maintain an ounce of academic legitimacy as a source for the studies, papers and thesis' of students and researchers everywhere relying on them should wholeheartedly reject generative Ai and remember that their first responsibility is to finding, preserving and spreading the entire nuanced truth, with a healthy dose of context, a thing far too fluid and complicated for an algorithm to understand, much less teach; I only hope that in time museums and archives will come to understand and appreciate that the human experts so many are seeking to replace are the one and only reason they were ever trusted as sources to begin with.

[deadchannelradio]

DICK GRAYSON and TALIA AL GHUL coparenting is such a cruel and unusual punishment for both of them but also for damian. I know they don’t do a good job of it either it’s a shitshow in the way typically only brought on by an acrimonious divorce. First time these behaviors have been seen outside of a walmart parking lot weekend custody swap

[deadchannelradio]

damian, coming back through the door of the manor with his overnight bag post-talia weekend, reading off of a piece of paper he's written all of her complaints on: mother says to tell you that you need to be doing a gluten-free dairy-free soy-free diet for me to promote brain health. Mother says she hates the shoes you bought me. Mother says she wants to change the custody agreement to a weekend every month instead of every other. Mother says she wants my robin patrols increased to every night instead of every two nights. Mother says you're a circus sideshow freak at best and your splits are mediocre. Mother says not to tell you that one. Mother sent me new soaps because she doesn't trust american chemicals.

dick, pulling out his phone and texting talia "your dad sucks my balls good and hard through my jorts" without looking once at the screen: okay. Thanks. did you have a good time though

[strawberri-draws]

winry!

[sorakasugano]

ZlayaMeduza

[northoftheroad]

Up to date with the trends, if you don’t mind!

As opposed to some people, I’m not of the opinion that Dick Grayson is a fashion disaster. I don’t imagine I will convince anyone who loves to portray him as the eternal looser… But the thing with fashion is that a lot of it quickly gets dated. Since artists have drawn Dick in contemporary style for decades, it’s bound to happen that some outfits get past their best before date.

If we’re to put the blame where it belongs, it has to be Greg Land, who drew Dick in a multicoloured polka dot shirt in Nightwing vol 1 # 2. That’s the outfit most people reference when they claim that Dick dresses outlandishly. However, in the 90s, polka dot shirts (and long hair on men) were trendy – which is something that we tend to forget some decades later, when another era of fashion surrounds us.

The original Nightwing suit from 1984 also gets a fair amount of flak. Certain artists, like Jim Aparo, drew the collar ridiculously high, unlike how it looked with George Pérez’ art. But on the whole, it’s not in a completely different style from other superhero suits that were introduced in the 70s and 80s. High collars and deep v-necks were popular. 

Tales of the Teen Titans # 44, Batman vol 1 # 441.

Tyroc (1976); Black Lightning (1977); Dazzler (1980); Jericho (1984).

Gladiator (1977), Black Cat (1979), Atari Force (1982), Mockingbird (1980), Booster Gold (1986).

Fashion at the time was about crossovers and breaking rules, and using fabrics such as rubber and vinyl. And disco…  Here are some pictures from the 70s and 80s, to remind ourselves what it looked like at the time.

I guess some people might point the finger at the original Robin suit, too? But, seriously, it’s a 1940s child superhero costume, designed at a time when the printing process favoured bright primary colours. (Besides, in a fair number of versions, Bruce is the one who designed the Robin suit. Now, if we want to talk ridiculous – take a look at Bob Kane’s original sketch of the Bat-Man.)

Without further ado. Let’s have a look at some of Dick’s outfits over the years, and see what was considered stylish at the time, shall we. 

Dick in civilan garbs in the 1940s and 1950s. The boy’s fashion at the time included knitted pullovers and sweaters which were also worn over shirt and tie. Bright solid or patterned sportcoats were worn with dress-shirt and necktie or bowtie. (Knickers, that is short trousers, were, by the way, children’s fashion in the 1940s.)

Pictures are fashion illustrations from the 40s and 50s and from Batman # 13 (1942). Star Spangled Comics # 65 (1947), # 75 (1947), # 98 (1949), # 111 (1950).

College teenager Dick in the 1970s dressed in sweaters, vests, long collared shirts. His hair was side-parted. And, you guessed it – vests, long collared shirts and turtleneck sweaters were essential fashion items of the 1970s. Dick-pics from: Batman # 248 (1973). Batman Family # 8 (1976). Detective Comics # 483 (1979). Detective Comics  # 495 (1980).

Dick in a green three piece suit in New Teen Titans Vol 1 # 26 (1982). Picture in Sears Fashion Catalogue 1981. 1980s vintage tweed suit.

Leather jacket, t-shirts and sweaters and jeans were trendy in the 1980s. In Tales of the teen titans 43 (1984), Dick wears jeans and an expensive leather jacket.

“That” outfit in Nightwing vol 1 # 2 (1995). “Seinfeld” from 1991.

Overalls were huge in the 1990s, even when you weren’t custom building your own car. Nightwing vol 2 # 16 (1998), and fashion photos from the 1990s.  

In the early 2000s, casual clothing was a big trend. Rugby shirts was a common look, and the leather jacket was still popular. Batman: Gotham Knights # 21 (2001), # 45 (2003), Nightwing vol 2 # 49 (2000), #77 (2003), # 80 (2003).

In the mid-2000s, some trendy things were: Casual, fitted shirt. Casual blazer. Cardigan. V-neck t-shirt. Trucker hat. Tank top. Nightwing vol 2 # 133 (2007), # 141 and # 144 (2008). Fashion photos from 2008, design Diesel, Tony Melillo.

In The New 52 and Rebirth, Dick has mostly dressed casually (unless it’s for a funeral, of course). Jeans, t-shirts, shirt without tie, sweaters, hoodie, parka, blazer or leather jacket. Often layer on layer - sweater over shirt, shirt on top of t-shirt…  The 2010s wasn’t long ago, and it’s not easy to sort through fashion shows and micro-trends and see a bigger picture just yet… But a few of the things that were trendy at least at some time during the 2010s were: the colour grey; one-button suits and blazers; striped sweater; checkered shirt; fitted leather jackets; parka; pastel colours; angular v-neck.  

Nightwing vol 3 # 5 (2012), # 6 (2012), # 10 (2012), # 17 (2013),  # 27 (2014). Nightwing vol 4 # 10 (2017), # 15 (2017). Assorted fashion photos from 2012–2017.  

Today it’s 2020, and when it comes to men’s hairstyles, crew cut is popular. Nightwing vol 4 # 63, and photo from TheTrendSpotter’s post 40 Best Short Hairstyles for Men in 2020.

And hey, superhero apparel were on the catwalk in the 2010s, too. How more fashion forward can Dick Grayson become…? Misel Saban, June 27, 2014 (Batman) and Sarah Dos Santos, December 16, 2013 (Superman); Kyle Towers, February 2, 2013 (Spiderman).

However, I don’t see Dick (written) as interested in keeping up with the fashion. But he did live his first years in a small trailer. And since then, he’s been accustomed to a life where you never know when your home is going to be obliterated, or your foster father will kick you out. Or when you have to rush away to follow a lead in another city or save the world somewhere. Or the next time you’ll be shot and forget that you have a flat to live in… He’s bound to have learned not to have an excessive amount of clothes. 

When he does need to buy something, because his last outfit went up in smoke or something, he’ll simply pick from what’s in the front inside the shops. Hence, he’ll often be dressed up-to-date. New Titans # 76, New Titans # 86, Nightwing vol 2 # 89, Nightwing vol 2 # 20, Nigtwing vol 3 # 19, Nightwing vol 4 # 50 , Robin Year One # 3.

Top pictures from: Batman # 237 (1971), New Teen Titans # 16 (1982), Nightwing vol 2 # 129 (2007), Nightwing vol 4 # 10 (2016).

[northoftheroad]

When I think of Wolverine’s hair, I think of pointy sideburns, to be honest, not long hair like Dick had in Nightwing Vol 1. But I guess you’re thinking of the hairy arms…? Yeah, the big visual problem with Nightwing Vol 1 isn’t the clothes but Dick’s body type. Which is strange, because the artist, Greg Land, drew him nicely (much leaner and more acrobatic) in a couple of issues in Nightwing Vol 2. Unless it’s the inkers that makes all the difference? 

Nightwing Vol 2 # 50. 

[jupitermelichios]

 #dick has a good sense of fashion 👏👏 Roy’s is shit 👏👏 Roy is the bad fashion influence 👏👏👏#dick Grayson 

@kiseiakhun you are absolutely correct but i content that it’s not roy’s fault, he was in a ska band at an influential point in his life

… i was going to say we’re just lucky ollie didn’t marry dinah until roy was an adult but based on some of the all leather looks he’s rocked over the years roy would absolutely wear the black canary costume if he thought he could get away with it

[sockiepuppetry]

GET FNAF'ED IDIOT

Silly halloween thing 👻

[grunkleguts]

Audio by Austin Trench

Art by me

(based on this tweet)